If you want a copy of the bookmark we gave graduates you can get that here.
Graduation Address
Headmaster Bunn, faculty, staff, parents, friends, and most
importantly, scholars from the class of 2014 it is an honor to be invited to
speak to you this evening. As I was preparing for this event I thought back to
my high school graduation more than thirty years ago and realized a couple of
I will
speak boldly because we are at a season when we do not have time for shrinking
words and passionless lives. With “wars and rumors of wars” filling our
headlines and our nation seeing the fastest growing religion is “no religion”,
it is a day to be bold.
I will
speak briefly because those of you who are graduating have the shortest
attention span of any graduating class in history. Thanks to the ever-present
source of information that is even now burning a hole in your pocket as you wish
you could Snapchat, text, check in on Foursquare, or post one more selfie on
Instagram (duck lips), your ability to focus upon a talking head has diminished
to being almost non-existent. Already I have lost some of you as you think you
are secretly posting how you wish this old guy would hurry up, but just so you
know, you aren’t that sneaky. So, in
case I lose you, these are my three challenges for you: love deeply; live
passionately; and listen to God intentionally. Let me repeat so you can tweet…#FCS Go ahead.
Crisis Brings Focus
So what has given me this clarity? Eleven
months ago I was diagnosed with a rare form of terminal, incurable cancer. It
is a terminal condition, which means that I will die from it or unless
something else gets me first. Of course according to one study I’m just as
likely to die hitting a deer on the highway at night, and if you have driven 64
after dark you know how risky that is. This cancer is incurable, meaning apart
from divine intervention, there is nothing they can do except control my
symptoms and buy me some time. All of this means that about a year ago I became
keenly aware of my morality. 80% of the people who are diagnosed with my
disease that have the level of liver metastasizes that I have die within that
initial five-year window. 80%, 8:10 is a tough mortality figure to face. There
are 35 graduates tonight, 80% of that is 28, imagine if there were only 7 of
you left. Five years from my diagnosis date will be July 10, 2018, in case you
are wondering, or about 212 weeks from now. Look at it this way, how many of
you are going to college? Go ahead, show me your hands, be proud of your
parents’ money that you will spend frivolously on overpriced pizza and color
coordinated dorm accessories you won’t be able to find by October due to the
enormous piles of laundry all over the floor. If you graduate in four years in
2018, chances are you won’t get a graduation card from me because there is an
80% chance I won’t be around by then. If you are a “special student” and take
five years to get through college…well, yeah, you get the picture. Heck, right
now I’ll be happy if I get to see Jacob, my son who is a freshman, graduate from
FCS in May of 2017. Of course that is assuming he can actually focus long
enough to actually do his schoolwork and my frustration with his distractions doesn’t
cause me a heart attack first. Cancer doesn't care if you have “important work”
to do or the best years of your life ahead of you.
What I know
about you, my friends in the Class of 2014, is that most of you are living in
your personal fable. Your personal fable is when your emotional, hormone
charged mind convinces you that you will never die. And I know you know about
your personal fable because you’ve read John Green’s Fault in Our Stars, well those of you that read anyway. And I know
that you think I don’t know what you know because you think you know everything
I know, but remember, I’ve been your age, you’ve never been my age. I remember
when I was your age thinking people my
age didn’t know what I knew, but I later discovered they knew what I knew and I
was too stupid to know that they knew. Got it? So, yes, you have your whole
life ahead of you; I mean there is a good chance that most of you will live to
be 100! But take a hint from a guy who probably won’t make it that long, no
matter how long you live it will go by very fast.
Life Lesson 1: Love
Deeply—love unconditionally and deliberately.
2 Cor. 4: “He is the same one who shone in our hearts to give us the light of
the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” Is the love
of Christ shining in your life? When you realize that you are deeply loved by
God, it allows you to be able to love deeply. If you can accept that you are
loved deeply, then you can love deeply.
Loving deeply is the opposite of
loving cheaply. We don’t
really love deeply; we love cheaply. In our social media saturated world where
with one click you can be deleted, unfriended, and removed from social contact
with another faster than you can get served at most drive-thru, fast food
places, we have lost the importance of real intimacy because real intimacy is
hard work. Loving deeply is a decision, and it is tough.
We have somehow confused love with a Disney princess
movie. Don’t get me wrong, I love Disney princesses as much as the next guy. I
mean my wife is the drama teacher so you KNOW we have done some Disney plays.
But what Disney usually depicts is not love. It is crisis-based,
overly-simplified, emotionally-laden, hormone-fueled infatuation. The problem
with infatuation is that it doesn’t last. Now I know some of you are in “love.”
Your heart quickens every time you see her. When he holds your hand you can
hardly breath. That is not love, that is asthma, and it will pass. You might
say that when it comes to infatuation, you really need to “let it go, let it
go…turn away and slam the door.” When I say that you need to invest your life
into loving deeply I mean something that will last.
Loving
deeply means you make the decision to love unconditionally and deliberately.
Love with conditions isn’t love;
it's a contract. It is a mutually beneficial exchange of services by people who
have similar interests and who affirm each other. That is not loving deeply. To
love deeply is to practice 1 Corinthians 13 as a way of life. That is the
famous “love chapter” of the Bible. I’ve read it at more weddings than I can
remember. The funny thing is that the writer of this chapter never married. Paul
intended for you to live it out, every day with everyone regardless of how you
“feel.” Feelings are important, but feelings are fleeting. Loving deeply is
more than an emotional response; it is an intentional, daily decision. Here is a list of things that “love is”, and
it is rather intimidating:
“Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor
others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of
wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always
protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a
I can hear you now, “Are you kidding me? That is
impossible. Have you met my brother?” Or your classmate, or that guy at church
(yes, people at church are sometimes the hardest to love), or whoever else God
places in your path that is difficult to love. Here is one of those hard truths
that I have realized as I look squarely at the end of my life. There is nobody
that Christ did not die for, whether I like them (or love them) or not. From your
pastor to the guy at the end of the exit ramp with a cardboard sign, Jesus paid
it all for all of them, too. Not just for me; not just for you.
We have this ridiculous notion that God only loves
people who are like us. But the Bible clearly says “God so loved the WORLD…”
The world means everybody, even people who don’t vote like me, look like me, or
believe like me. Real love means we treat everybody we come into contact with
as if they were Jesus. The scripture reminds us that there are times when we
have entertained “angels unaware.” Love is the only thing in your life that the
more you give away, the more you receive. But there is a problem, sometimes you
can really try to love somebody and they can refuse to love you back, you know
what that sounds like? That sounds an awful lot like Jesus, who loved you
“while you were yet a sinner.”
If you live life in that 1 Corinthians 13 way you
are going to get hurt. There are people you can love that will never love you
back. So what? Love them anyway. There are people that will use your
vulnerability against you. So what? Love them anyway. There are people who will
unfriend you over a simple misunderstanding, delete you when you don’t affirm
their political view, despise you when you are trying to do your best. So what?
Love them anyway.
Do you really want to spend your life wasting time
on things that don’t matter? You don’t really want to waste time on grudges,
petty differences, or even big offenses? Here is a huge life lesson, the
further away you get from high school the more you realize that most of the
stuff you were upset over during school will not affect the rest of your life.
Another thing I am certain of is that unforgiveness
mostly hurts the unforgiver. When I choose, or you choose, to nurture jealousy,
or hurt feelings, or petty differences rather than deeply loving we are really
hurting our own heart. Most of the time those who we have unfriended don’t know
and/or don’t care. Love “keeps no record of wrongs.” Wow, that stings huh? I
mean how many times have you been in an argument and brought up all the stuff
from the past as extra ammunition? That means it is not love, its back to that
mutual benefit contract relationship. Love is unconditional or it isn’t love at
all. Paul tells us in 2 Cor. 4 that “the
same one who shone in our hearts to give us the light...” What light
are you shining? Are you reflecting the unconditional love that God gives you
in Christ? Are you showing it?
I believe to love is a deliberate decision. It is
not accidental. There is somebody in your life, right now, who needs to know
that you love them.
Look down your row, at those who are graduating with
you. Statistically one in four high school students in America has had some
serious bouts with depression and felt unloved. One in ten have had such a
major issue with depression that they have had suicidal thoughts. There is
somebody near you who has wondered whether God loves them or anyone else loves
them because we are so uptight about showing people how much we care that we’d
rather let them suffer than risk being awkward.
Yes, I know it is awkward sometimes, but this is
what I’ve discovered in the last eleven months, the more you say it, the less
awkward it becomes. The more you show it, the easier it is to live it. Like
everything else, the more you practice the easier it gets.
Don’t just say it, show it. Love is more about life
service than lip service. (also a tweetable phrase, #awesomegradspeaker) Words
can quickly become cheap if they aren’t backed up with action. Your mama was right when she said that people
judge what you do far more than what you say.
Life Lesson 2: Live
Passionately—focus on significance not success.
2
Cor. 4 “We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren’t crushed. We are
confused, but we aren’t depressed. We are harassed, but we aren’t abandoned.
We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out.”
Living passionately is the opposite
of living passively. When I was in high school two things that happened almost
simultaneously changed the way I looked at my future: I read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
and I took a Dale Carnegie Leadership course. Both of these experiences
hammered into my head the importance of resilience. Of getting up when you get
knocked down, of not quitting. There were a couple of lessons that stuck out to
me then and that I have re-visited in the past eleven months that help me focus
upon living passionately and keeping my focus on what is significant, and not
what culture defines as success: be proactive; begin with the end in mind.
Living passionately means we must
be proactive, not reactive. We let life come at us rather than being proactive.
Every time in my life when I have lived as a reaction to my circumstances I
regretted it.
Being proactive means you take
responsibility and you take action. Some of you have skated through high school
and allowed your parents to make all of your decisions. Some of you have even
let them “help” with your projects. It is time for you to take responsibility
and to take action. When you get to college most of your professors won’t know
who your parents are and they really won’t care. As a matter of fact, they are
not even allowed to talk to your folks, so if you don’t show up, they won’t
care. They will just flunk you out of school and send you back home to get a
job. At my college freshman orientation the dean of NCSU told me to look to the
right and to the left. Then she said, “one of the three of you will drop out of
school by the end of your first year.” She was right, it was me.
Some of it is not your fault, I
know, because my generation is the generation of “helicopter parents.” We want
you to succeed so badly that we forgot to let you fail. We put knee pads and
elbow pads on you when you road your bike so you wouldn’t get skinned up. You
had car seats, helmets, and safety bars on just about everything. We gave you a
trophy for showing up and did everything we could to keep you from “losing.”
And I'm sorry, because this means that when the day comes when bad things
happen some of you will be devastated. No matter how much we try to protect
you, your life will have hurt, pain, and failure. As long as we live in a world
broken by sin, there will be times when things stink.
Bad things happen to good people. I
don’t have time to go into a diatribe about my theology of sin; but when you
are ready to discuss the deeper things, let me know. I’ll be happy to ask you
hard questions and shake up your understanding of God and sin. Just know that
there are times when life is hard. Long before Vince Lombardi said, “It’s not
how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up,” Paul
wrote, “We are harassed, but we aren’t
abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out.” So get up.
Make a plan and get moving. When you get the news my family received on July
10, 2013 you have two choices, “get busy living or get busy dying” (if you are
reading this on my blog, this is the scene where I got that great quote from Shawshank Redemption clip here).
If I could give you any gift at
all, I’d give you resilience: the ability to keep moving when it would be
easier to stop; the determination to go to work when it would be easier to
quit; the perseverance to keep showing up. A long time ago a wise man who was
very successful told me his secret to success: keep showing up. Refuse to
quit.
Living passionately also means
beginning with the end in mind. I have often made the joke that I wanted a
thousand people at my funeral; wow, that’s egotistical. What I meant is that I
wanted to look back at my life and know that I helped people get connected to
God, to others, and to their divine calling. I have always had “an end in mind,”
but now it is even more pressing. Now that I have limited energy, I have to
begin every day thinking “what is the most important thing I can do for the
kingdom of God today?” The amazing thing is that if you are busy loving deeply
and you have a picture of what you want your end to look like, priorities are
easier. That doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes, that I don’t waste some of
those precious 1,440 minutes I’m given every day playing lame games online,
cause who doesn’t like Minions? But it does mean that I am making an intentional
decision to focus on a life of significance. For me this means I disciple a few
people more deeply rather than a leading a lot of people to make a surface
decision.
Since I was twelve years old I’ve
wanted to be a writer, but I kept putting it off, there would always be time
for that. Now, there isn’t time. What is it you are putting off because you
think you will have time for it later? In the past eleven months I’ve written more
than 250,000 words. I have written more than 40,000 words about my initial
month or so having a terminal illness, 50,000 in a daily devotion series
“Welcome to a Life that Matters,” thousands of words for blogs and articles. I
am finally doing what I dreamed I would do
What is it you want to do? It is
okay not to know right now, but I am betting you have some idea of something
you want to do. Climb Mount Everest, become a doctor, write a novel. Good.
Write it down, put it somewhere you will see it every day and do something,
every day, that will bring it closer into becoming a reality.
Life Lesson 3: Listen
to God Intentionally—focus on where God is leading, not what others are saying.
2 Cor. 4 “Our temporary minor problems are producing
an eternal stockpile of glory for us that is beyond all comparison. We don’t
focus on the things that can be seen but on the things that can’t be seen.
The things that can be seen don’t last, but the things that can’t be seen are
eternal.”
Our world
is loud and God usually whispers. Culture defines success by what you gather;
significance is defined by what you give.
I recently
read Daring Greatly by Brene’ Brown. One
thing she said really stuck with me, it was that most of us define our lives by
what we lack. Our self-definition revolves around the statement, “I’m not
___________ enough.” I’m not smart enough, rich enough, pretty enough, skinny
enough, big enough, fast enough.
I grew up
never thinking I was enough. My father abandoned me; I wasn’t a good enough
son. I was cut from the team; I wasn’t a good enough athlete. I didn’t get to
go to our honors class trip to Washington because we didn’t have the money, I
wasn’t wealthy enough. I was never the best at anything; I was never enough
because in my mind if you weren’t the best, you weren’t enough. Every time I
had any set back, it reinforced my not being enough. I have spent my whole life
trying to prove myself. In the past eleven months I have come to realize that I
am enough because Jesus says so.
We have a focus on scarcity when we
serve a God of abundance. God made you. Jesus redeemed you. The Spirit inspires
you because you are worth it. You are enough. You are the YOU God created you
to be. The key is to quit listening to the voices of culture that tell you what
you aren’t good enough, or rich enough, or smart enough. Quit listening to
voices of people who don’t really care about you. Quit listening to voices of
people simply trying to sell you a hollow image or consumption-based ideal.
Abercrombie and Hollister just want your cash, they don’t want you to change
the world. Your calling is not to be simply consumers, your call is to be
creators of a new world, sculptors of the future, connectors in a global
movement to live out the gospel to the streets of New York, and New Delhi. Listen
to God who reveals to you who you really are. Listen for God to whisper to you
when you study the scripture; when you worship; and spend time serving those
who can offer you nothing in return. Then will you truly understand what it
means to love deeply and live passionately. There has never in the history of
humanity been a time when one person could make a difference like today. With
that technology is in your hands you can communicate around the world. You can
work for justice in ways not even conceived just a few years ago. Don’t waste
the opportunity God has given you. Love deeply; live passionately; and for the
sake of a world far from God, listen to God intentionally. God will not make
you listen. God invites you to listen. God is speaking. The question is are you
listening?
Consumed by the Call,
Dr. Marty Cauley
Some of the research came from these sites:
Consumed by the Call,
Dr. Marty Cauley
Some of the research came from these sites:
http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/health4.asp
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-work/201203/has-coddling-entire-generation-children-set-them-fo
http://www.parentingchallenges.com/pages/articles06.htm
